It's time for a change: Reflections on useful paradigms in the study of learning disorders from the RDoC perspective

The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) perspective proposes to initiate a broad program of studies that is not tied to specific behavioral diagnoses (as in the DSM or ICD) but addresses mental disorders in an integrated way, considering different levels of analysis and the developmental context in which they develop. To do this, in their target article Antonietti and colleagues propose to use research paradigms different from those used to date. In this perspective, it is analyzed how the case-control paradigm (widely used to date) does not consider the frequent comorbidities present with various ASDs nor the effect of practice (a problem often, but ineffectively, addressed by the "reading level match"). Furthermore, using dyslexia as an example, it is illustrated how studies based on these paradigms have generated a wide variety of results that do not allow for convergence on a unitary interpretation. Alternatively, in line with the RDoC rationale, one can think of studies that consider samples of unselected children or children with "mixed" disorders, i.e., in which there is "at least" one learning disorder, and that do not have a single target behavior but address multiple behaviors together. However, it is also emphasized that it is necessary to think about different studies and paradigms that separately address the complexity of learning behaviors from the perspective of multilevel analysis. Finally, a study is presented that exemplifies some of the characteristics of the RDoC perspective. In this, it is shown how the ability of an unselected group of children to construct consolidated representations of individual events (instances) predicts performance in reading, spelling, and computation tasks in which reference to prior knowledge is important (such as spelling words with ambiguous transcription) but not in those that require reference to a specific algorithm to be solved (such as spelling pseudo-words).